Tag Archives: pigeons

I’m a LIRR commuter – like many LBers, and look forward to the delays, bomb scares, occasionally odd passengers, and otherwise thrilling commute I’m hit with on a daily basis. Long Beach started with a train track and a dream. Before there was ever a car bridge (and before there were cars) over Reynolds Channel (which wasn’t called that yet), Austin Corbin decided to run tracks from Lynbrook to the unpopulated Long Beach and built the Long Beach Hotel.

Fast forward some 120 years, and the LIRR is still sending trains back and forth to the barrier beach where more than 33,000 people live. This is a long way of saying, beyond the parking garage added in 2005, not much has been done on the Long Beach terminal… until this weekend.

One of those nagging things that always irritated me was the bird crap everywhere around the station – as it seems every pigeon and seagull for 100 miles made the platform’s overhangs and underhangs their personal roosts. This led to those winged-rats leaving their presents all over the station, regardless of how often LIRR staff cleaned things up.

This weekend it looks like a crew came in, put spike strips on everything, and further, completely caged off all the underhangs and beams that the birds loved to sit on. And now, two days later, the entire platform and waiting area remains, crap free. This is one of those little improvements that probably cost close to nothing but so dramatically improves the basic quality of the area that it should serve as an example of one of those “little” projects, with a massive impact.